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Back to the Future? Abortion Before & After

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Back to the Future? Abortion Before & After Back to the Future? Abortion Before & After Roe Ted Joyce, Ruoding Tan and Yuxiu Zhang Next year marks the 40th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. We use unique data on abortions performed in New York State from 1971-1975 to analyze the impact of legalized abortion in New York on abortion and birth rates of non- residents. We estimate that abortion rates declined by 12.0 percent for every hundred miles a woman lived from New York in the years before Roe. If Roe were overturned average travel distance to the nearest abortion provider would increase by 157 miles in the 31 states expected to prohibit abortion. Under this scenario abortion rates would fall by 14.9 percent nationally, resulting in at most, 178,800 additional births or 4.2 percent of the U.S. total in 2008. A ban in 17 states would result in a 6.0 percent decline in abortions and at most, 1.7 percent rise in births. August 2012 Acknowledgements This study has been supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to the Research Foundation of the City University of New York (1RO3HD064760-01). We thank seminar participants at RAND, the Guttmacher Institute, and Baruch’s School of Public Affairs for comments and Phillip Levine for detail suggestions. Ted Joyce Ruoding Tan Yuxiu Zhang, PhD NBER-NY& Department of Economics Health Policy and Admin Baruch College, CUNY Graduate Center, CUNY Yale School of Public Health 365 Fifth Ave, 5th Floor 365 Fifth Ave, 5th Fl 60 College St NY, NY 10016 NY, NY 10016 New Haven, CT 06510 [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] I. Introduction Next year marks the 40th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade, the decision that legalized abortion in the United States. It is hard to exaggerate its divisive impact on U.S. politics broadly and on the abortion service industry specifically. Abortion clinics have been firebombed, physicians murdered, and abortion patients frequently walk a gauntlet of protesters on their entrance to a facility (Jacobson and Royer 2011). And yet despite the controversy and violence, and despite the advances in hormonal contraceptives, morning after pills, and the wider use of condoms among youth, induced abortion remains a common method of fertility control. The number of abortions peaked at approximately 1.61 million per year in 1990 but there were still over 1.21 million abortions in 2008 (Jones and Kooistra 2011). Approximately, 43 percent of unintended pregnancies are voluntarily terminated (Finer and Zolna 2006). But there is uncertainty as to the future status of legalized abortion in the U.S. Since Roe, many states have passed laws that reflect a widespread antipathy towards abortion on demand. These include financing restrictions, parental consent for minors, mandated counseling and waiting periods, required ultrasounds as well as unnecessary building codes and licensing requirements for providers. More recent legislative actions have sought a declaration that life begins at conception or when a fetal heartbeat is heard. Many analysts believe that the Supreme Court is but one vote away from overturning Roe. There is little doubt that a reversal of Roe would have a substantial impact on abortion and birth rates in US. The best evidence as to what a reversal might mean comes from changes in birth rates before and after legalization in the early 1970s (Levine et al. 1999; Levine 2004; Angrist and Evans 1999). Results from these influential studies have proven to be robust and the 1 difference-in-difference research design has been the basis for much subsequent work. And yet, without data on abortions in the pre-Roe era, it was not possible to know the impact of legalization on abortion rates, the relationship between abortion and birth rates or even the total effect of legalization on fertility. The latter holds because many women traveled to California, Washington D.C. and especially to New York for abortions in the years before Roe. Consequently, the effect of legalized abortion on birth rates extended beyond states in which abortion became available on demand. The importance of travel from states in which abortion was illegal to states in which abortion was legal is dramatically illustrated by the map in Figure 1. The number in each state is the abortion rate for residents of the state that were performed in New York in 1971-1972, the two years before the Supreme Court decision in Roe. For instance, there were 7.6 abortions to residents of Michigan per 1000 women 15-44 obtained in New York. In 1972 alone, 15,522 women traveled from Michigan to New York for an abortion.1 In this study we return to the period just before and after Roe to analyze the impact of legalized abortion in New York on the abortion and birth rates of women most affected by the change in New York. Despite the limited geographical focus, the data are unique and they enable us to address several questions in the reproductive health literature that have been challenging to tackle. For instance, the simultaneous relationship between the supply and demand for reproductive services has made it difficult to identify the separate effect of each. The legalization of abortion in New York in July of 1970 provides an opportunity to assess the impact of a plausibly exogenous change in the availability of abortion services on use by non- residents moderated in part by distance to the State. As Figure 1 demonstrates, travel to New York for an abortion was substantial but it varied by proximity. A second supply shock occurred 1 Authors’ tabulations of data from the New York State Department of Health. See Table 1. 2 with Roe in January of 1973 as abortion providers became available in every state obviating most travel to New York. We exploit both these changes to identify the effect of access to abortion on use. Another empirical challenge is estimating the relationship between birth and abortion rates. There were less than 13,000 reported legal abortions in 1969 and 3,600,206 births, a legal abortion rate less than 1.0 and a fertility rate of 86.1. By 1975 the number of legal abortions had increased to 1,034,200, an abortion rate of 21.7, while the fertility rate had fallen to 66.0. 2 How much of the decline in fertility can be attributed to the increase in reported legal abortions is unknown given the lack of data on illegal abortions prior to Roe as well ongoing changes in sexual activity, contraception, marriage, and women’s role in society to name only some of the potential confounders evolving during this period. In an effort to estimate the effect of abortion on fertility, we regress birth rates on lagged abortion rates in the years before Roe with distance to New York as an instrument. In the last section we use the relationships between the availability and use of abortion services to project the possible impact of overturning Roe. Several legal analyses have made predictions as to which states are likely to ban abortion if jurisdiction is returned to the states. We compute the change in distance to the nearest legal abortion provider under various scenarios and apply our pre-Roe estimates to predict changes in abortion and birth rates. The exercise is clearly speculative for many of the conditions that existed in 1972 have changed, but recent studies suggest that access to abortion services is still an important determinant of use (Colman and Joyce 2011). 2 The abortion rate is the number of legal abortion per 1000 women 15 to 44 years of age. The fertility rate is the number of births per 1000 women 15 to 44. Sources: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr60/nvsr60_01.pdf. Jones and Kooistra (2011). 3 Our analysis is made possible by re-discovered data on abortions performed in New York State to residents and non-residents in the years before and after Roe. Data are available by age, race, year and state of residence from 1971 to 1975. Thus, we are able to provide a detailed analysis of access and use of abortion services and their impact on birth rates during this period of dramatic change. We find a robust association between distance to New York and abortion rates in the years before Roe. Abortion rates fell 11.9 percent for every hundred miles a woman lived from New York and the decline was greater for nonwhites than for whites. Our preferred estimates suggest that each abortion was associated with an decline of 0.56 births. Based on these estimates, we predict that abortion rates would fall by 14.9 percent resulting in 100,838 unintended births—or 2.4 percent of total live births in 2008—were Roe overturned and 31 states banned abortion. If we assume that each abortion is associated with one less birth, an obvious upper bound, then the number of unintended births rise to 178,804 or 4.2 percent of the national total. These declines seem modest, but plausible. Even with a ban in 31 states, the average distance to an abortion provider increases by only 157 miles. What is apparent from the pre-Roe abortion data, is that although distance matters, women were willing to travel hundreds of miles to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. We predict that most women would continue to travel long distances to terminate a pregnancy, if abortion were no longer legal in their state.
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